Rabbit, Run

by John Updike

  “I’m sure you can find somebody else. Vacation’s start­ed; it’d be a perfect job for some high-school kid.”

  “No,” she says, “no. I won’t think about it. I won’t be here next year to see Harry’s rhodies come in again. You kept me alive, Harry; it’s the truth; you did. All winter I was fighting the grave and then in April I looked out the window and here was this tall young man burning my old stalks and I knew life hadn’t left me. That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.” Her crystal eyes have filmed with a liquid thicker than tears and she grabs his arms above his elbows with hard brown claws. “Fine strong young man,” she mur­murs, and her eyes come back into focus as she adds, “You have a proud son; take care.”

  She must mean he should be proud of his son and take care of him. He is moved by her embrace; he wants to respond and did moan “No” at her prediction of death. But his right hand is full of melting mashed candy, and he stands helpless and rigid hearing her quaver, “Good-by. I wish you well. I wish you well.”

  In the week that follows this blessing, he and Nelson are often happy. They go for walks around the town. One day they watch a softball game played on the high-school lot by men with dark creased faces like millworkers, dressed in gaudy felt-and-flannel uniforms, one team bearing the name of a fire hall in Brewer and the other the name of the Sunshine Athletic Association, the same uniforms, he guesses, that he saw hanging in the attic the time he slept in Toth­ero’s bedroom. The number of spectators sitting on the dis­mantleable bleachers is no greater than the number of players. All around, behind the bleachers and the chickenwire-and­-pipe backstop, kids in sneakers scuffle and run and argue. He and Nelson watch a few innings, while the sun lowers into the trees. It floods Rabbit with an ancient, papery warmth, the oblique sun on his cheeks, the sparse inattentive crowd, the snarled pepper chatter, the spurts of dust on the yellow infield, the girls in shorts strolling past with choc­olate popsicles. Brown adolescent legs thick at the ankle and smooth at the thigh. They know so much, at least their skins do. Boys their age scrawny sticks in dungarees and Keds arguing frantically if Williams was washed up or not. Mantle 10,000 times better. Williams 10,000,000 times better. He and Nelson share an orange soda bought from a man in a Boosters’ Club apron who has established a bin in the shade. The smoke of dry ice leaking from the ice-cream section, the ffp of the cap being pulled from the orange. The artificial sweetness fills his heart. Nelson spills on his chest trying to get it to his lips.

  Another day they go to the playground. Nelson acts frightened of the swings. Rabbit tells him to hold on and pushes very gently, from the front so the kid can see. Laughs, pleads, “Me out,” begins to cry, “me out, me out, Da-dee.” Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small head­ache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle-chains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children’s murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that had left his life had left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The best he can do is submit to the system and give Nelson the chance to pass, as he did, un­thinkingly, through it. The fullness ends when we give Na­ture her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

  They visit Mom-mom Springer. The child is delighted; Nelson loves her, and this makes Rabbit like her. Though she tries to pick a fight with him he refuses to fight back, just admits everything; he was a crumb, a dope, he behaved terribly, he’s lucky not to be in jail. Actually there’s no real bite in her attack. Nelson is there for one thing, and for another she is relieved he has come back and is afraid of scaring him off. For a third, your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something re­laxing and even comic about them. He and the old lady sit on the screened sunporch with iced tea; her bandaged legs are up on a stool and her little groans as she shifts her weight make him smile. It feels like he’s visiting a silly girl friend. Nelson and Billy Fosnacht are inside the house play­ing quietly. They’re too quiet. Mrs. Springer wants to see what’s happening but doesn’t want to move her legs; in her torment she starts to complain about what a crude child little Billy Fosnacht is, and from this shifts over to the kid’s mother. Mrs. Springer doesn’t like her, doesn’t trust her around the corner; it isn’t just the sunglasses, though she thinks that’s a ridiculous affectation; it’s the girl’s whole creepy manner, the way she came cozying around to Janice just because it looked like juicy gossip. “Why, she came around here so much that I had more charge of Nelson than Janice did, with those two off to the movies every day like high-school girls that don’t have the responsibility of being mothers.” Now Rabbit knows from school that Peggy Fosnacht, then Peggy Gring, wears sunglasses because she is freakishly, humiliatingly walleyed. And Eccles has told him that her company was a great comfort to Janice during the trying period now past. But he does not make either of these objections; he listens contentedly, pleased to be united with Mrs. Springer, the two of them against the world. The cubes in the iced tea melt, making the beverage doubly bland; his mother-in-law’s talk leaves his ears like the swirling mutter of a brook. Lulled, he lets his lids lower and a smile creeps into his face; he sleeps badly at nights, alone, and drowses now on the grassy breadth of day, idly blissful, snug on the right side at last.

  It is quite different at his own parents’ home. He and Nel­son go there once. His mother is angry about something; her anger hits his nostrils as soon as he’s in the door, like a lin­ing of dust on everything. This house looks shabby and small after the Springers’. What ails her? He assumes she’s al­ways been on his side and tells her in a quick gust of con­fiding how terrific the Springers have been, how Mrs. Springer is really quite warmhearted and seems to have for­given him everything, how Mr. Springer kept up the rent on their apartment and now has promised him a job selling cars in one of his lots. He owns four lots in Brewer and vicinity; Rabbit had no idea he was that much of an operator. He’s really kind of a jerk but a successful jerk at least; at any rate he thinks he, Harry Angstrom, has gotten off pretty easily. His mother’s hard arched nose and steamed spectacles glitter bitterly. Her disapproval nicks him whenever she turns from the sink. At first he thinks it’s that he never got in touch with her but if that’s so she should be getting less sore instead of more because he’s in touch with her now. Then he thinks it’s that she’s disgusted he slept with Ruth, and committed adultery; she’s getting religious as she gets older and probably thinks of him as around twelve years old any­way, but out of a clear sky she explodes that by asking abruptly, “And what’s going to happen to this poor girl you lived with in Brewer?”

  “Her? Oh, she can take care of herself. She didn’t expect nothing.” But he tastes his own saliva saying it. It makes his life seem cramped, that Ruth can be mentioned out of his mother’s mouth.

  Her mouth goes thin and she answers with a smug flirt of her head, “I’m not saying anything, Harry. I’m not saying one word.”

  But of course she is saying a great deal only he doesn’t know what it is. There’s some kind of clue in the way she treats Nelson. She as good as ignores him, doesn’t offer him toys or hug him, just says, “Hello, Nelson,” with a little nod, her glasses snapping into white circles. After Mrs. Springer’s warmth this coolness seems brutal. Nelson feels it and acts hushed and frightened and leans against his father’s legs. Now Rabbit doesn’t know what’s eating his mother but she certainly shouldn’t take it out on a two-year-old kid. He never heard of a grandmother acting this way. It’s true, just the poor kid’s bein
g there keeps them from having the kind of conversation they used to have, where his mother tells him something pretty funny that happened in the neighbor­hood and they go on to talk about him, the way he used to be as a kid, how he dribbled the basketball all afternoon until after dark and was always looking after Mim. Nelson’s being half Springer seems to kill all that. For the moment he stops liking his mother; it takes insanity to snub a tiny kid that just learned to talk. He wants to say to her, What is this anyway? You act like I’ve gone over to the other side. You’re acting insane. Don’t you know it’s the right side and why don’t you praise me?

  But he doesn’t say this; he has a stubbornness to match hers. He doesn’t say much at all to her, after telling her what good sports the Springers are doesn’t go over. He just hangs around, him and Nelson rolling a lemon back and forth in the kitchen. Whenever the lemon wobbles over toward his mother’s feet he has to get it; Nelson won’t. The silence makes Rabbit blush, for himself or for her he doesn’t know. When his father comes home it isn’t much better. The old man isn’t angry but he looks at Harry like there isn’t anything there. His weary hunch and filthy fingernails annoy his son; it’s as if he’s willfully aging them all. Why doesn’t he get false teeth that fit? His mouth works like an old woman’s. But one thing at least, his father pays some attention to Nelson, who hopefully rolls the lemon toward him. He rolls it back. “You going to be a ballplayer like your Dad?”

  “He can’t, Earl,” Mom interrupts, and Rabbit is happy to hear her voice, thinks the ice has broken, until he hears what she says. “He has those little Springer hands.” These words, spoken hard as steel, strike a flurry of sparks off Rabbit’s heart.

  “The hell he does,” he says, and regrets it, being trapped. It shouldn’t matter what size hands Nelson has. Now he dis­covers it does matter; he doesn’t want the boy to have his mother’s hands, and, if he does—and if Mom noticed it he probably does—he likes the kid a little less. He likes the kid a little less but he hates his mother for making him do it. It’s as if she wants to pull down everything, even if it falls on her. And he admires this, her willingness to have him hate her, so long as he gets her message. But he rejects her message, he feels it probing at his heart and rejects it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t want to hear her say another word. He just wants to get out with a little piece of his love of her left.

  At the door he asks his father, “Where’s Mim?”

  “We don’t see much of Mim any more,” the old man says. His blurred eyes sink and he touches the pocket of his shirt, which holds two ballpoint pens and a little soiled packet of cards and papers. Just in these last few years his father has been making little bundles of things, cards and lists and re­ceipts and tiny calendars that he wraps rubber bands around and tucks into different pockets with an elderly fussiness. Rabbit leaves his old home depressed, with a feeling of his heart having slumped off center.

  The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and, the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear. The child’s sleep is so heavy he fears it might break the membrane of life and fall through to oblivion. Sometimes he reaches into the crib and lifts the boy’s body out, just to reassure himself with its warmth and the respon­sive fumbling protest of the tumbled limp limbs.

  He rattles around in the apartment, turning on all the lights and television, drinking ginger ale and leafing through old Life’s, grabbing anything to stuff into the emptiness. Be­fore going to bed himself he stands Nelson in front of the toi­let, running the faucet and stroking the taut bare bottom until wee-wee springs from the child’s irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl. Then he wraps a diaper around Nelson’s middle and returns him to the crib and braces himself to leap the deep gulf between here and the mo­ment when in the furry slant of morning sun the boy will appear, resurrected, in sopping diapers, beside the big bed, patting his father’s face experimentally. Sometimes he gets into the bed, and then the clammy cold cloth shocking Rab­bit’s skin is like retouching a wet solid shore. The time in between is of no use to Rabbit. But the urgency of his wish to glide over it balks him. He lies in bed, diagonally, so his feet do not hang over, and fights the tipping sensation inside him. Like an unsteered boat, he keeps scraping against the same rocks: his mother’s ugly behavior, his father’s gaze of desertion, Ruth’s silence the last time he saw her, his moth­er’s oppressive not saying a word, what ails her? He rolls over on his stomach and seems to look down into a bottomless sea, down and down, to where crusty crags gesture amid blind lead. Good old Ruth in the swimming pool. That poor jerk Harrison sweating it out Ivy-League style the son of a bitch. Margaret’s weak little dirty hand flipping over into Tothero’s mouth and Tothero lying there with his tongue floating around under twittering jellied eyes: No. He doesn’t want to think about that. He rolls over on his back in the hot dry bed and the tipping sensation returns severely. Think of some­thing pleasant. Basketball and cider at that little school down at the end of the country Oriole High but it’s too far back he can’t remember more than the cider and the way the crowd sat up on the stage. Ruth at the swimming pool; the way she lay in the water without weight, rounded by the water, slip­ping backwards through it, eyes shut and then out of the water with the towel, him looking up her legs at the secret hair and then her face lying beside him huge and yellow and still: dead. No. He must blot Tothero and Ruth out of his mind both remind him of death. They make on one side the vacuum of death and on the other side the threat of Jan­ice coming home grows: that’s what makes him feel tipped, lopsided. Though he’s lying there alone he feels crowded, all these people troubling about him not much their faces or words as their mute dense presences, pushing in the dark like crags under water and under everything like a faint high hum Eccles’ wife’s wink. That wink. What was it? Just a lit­tle joke in the tangle at the door, the kid coming down in her underpants and maybe she conscious of him looking at her toenails, a little click of the eye saying On your way Good luck or was it a chink of light in a dark hall saying come in? Funny wise freckled piece he ought to have nailed her that steady high hum bothering him ever since she wanted him to really nail her the shadow of her bra tipped bumps, in a room full of light slips down the shorts over the child­ish thighs fat butt two globes hanging of white in the light Freud in the white-painted parlor hung with watercolors of canals; come here you primitive father canals on the sofa she sits spreads like two white gates parted—what a nice chest you have and here and here and here. He rolls over and the dry sheet is the touch of her anxious hands, him­self tapering tall up from furred velvet, ridges through which the thick vein strains, and he does what he must with a tight knowing hand to stop the high hum and make himself slack for sleep. A woman’s sweet froth. Nails her. Passes through the diamond standing on his head and comes out on the other side wet. How silly. He feels sorry. Queer where the wet is, nowhere near where you’d think, on the top sheet instead of the bottom. He puts his cheek on a fresh patch of pillow. He tips less, Lucy undone. Her white lines drift off like un­raveled string. He must sleep; the thought of the far shore approaching makes a stubborn lump in his glide. Think of things pleasant. Out of all his remembered life the one place that comes forward where he can stand without the ground turning into faces he is treading on is that lot outside the diner in West Virginia after he went in and had a cup of coffee the night he drove down there. He remembers the mountains around him like a ring of cutouts against the moon-bleached blue of the night sky. He remembers the din­er, with its golden windows like the windows of the trolley cars that used to run from Mt. Judge into Brewer when he was a kid, and the air, cold but soft with the beginnings of spring. He hears the footsteps tapping behind him on the asphalt, and sees the couple run
ning toward their car, hands linked. One of the red-haired girls that sat inside with her hair hanging down like seaweed. And it seems right here that he made the mistaken turning, that he should have followed, and it seems to him in his disintegrating state that he did follow, that he is following, like a musical note that all the while it is being held seems to travel though it stays in the same place. On this note he carries into sleep.

  But awakes before dawn being tipped again, frightened on the empty bed, with the fear that Nelson has died. He tries to sneak back into the dream he was having but his nightmare fear dilates and he at last gets up and goes to hear the boy breathe and then urinates with slight pain and returns to a bed whose wrinkles the first stirrings of light are etching into black lines. On this net he lies down and steals the hour left before the boy comes to him, hungry and cold.

  On Friday Janice comes home. For the first days the presence of the baby fills the apartment as a little casket of incense fills a chapel. Rebecca June lies in a bassinet of plaited rushes painted white and mounted on a trundle. When Rabbit goes over to look at her, to reassure himself that she is there, he sees her somehow dimly, as if the baby has not gathered to herself the force that makes a silhouette. Her averted cheek, drained of the bright red he glimpsed at the hospital, is mottled gray, yellow, and blue, marbled like the palms of his hands when he is queasy; when Janice suckles Rebecca, yellow spots well up on her breast as if in answer to the fainter shadows of this color in the baby’s skin. The union of breast and baby’s face makes a globular sym­metry to which both he and Nelson want to attach them­selves. When Rebecca nurses, Nelson becomes agitated, climbs against them, pokes his fingers into the seam between the baby’s lips and his mother’s udder and, scolded and pushed away, wanders around the bed intoning, a promise he has heard on television, “Mighty Mouse is on the way.” Rabbit himself loves to lie beside them watching Janice manipulate her swollen breasts, the white skin shiny from fullness. She thrusts the thick nipples like a weapon into the blind blistered mouth, that opens and grips with birdy quickness. “Ow!” Janice winces, and then the glands within the baby’s lips begin to bubble in tune with her milk-making glands; the symmetry is established; her face relaxes into a downward smile. She holds a diaper against the other breast, mopping the waste milk it exudes in sympathy. Those first days, full of rest and hospital health, she has more milk than the baby takes. Between feedings she leaks; the bodices of all her nighties bear two stiff stains. When he sees her naked, naked all but for the elastic belt that holds her Modess pad in place, her belly shaved and puffed and soft, his whole stom­ach stirs at the fierce sight of her breasts, braced high by the tension of their milk, jutting from her slim body like glossy green-veined fruit with coarse purple tips. Top-heavy, bandaged, Janice moves gingerly, as if she might spill, jarred. Though with the baby her breasts are used without shame, tools like her hands, before his eyes she is still shy, and quick to cover herself if he watches too openly. But he feels a difference between now and when they first loved, lying side by side on the borrowed bed, his eyes closed, together making the filmy sideways descent into one another. Now, she is intermittently careless, walks out of the bathroom naked, lets her straps hang down while she burps the baby, seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for loving, hatching, feeding. He, too, leaks, thick sweet love burdens his chest, and he wants her—just a touch, he knows she’s a bleeding wound, but just a touch, just enough to get rid of his milk, give it to her. Though in her ether trance she spoke of making love, she turns away from him in bed, and sleeps with a heaviness that feels sullen. He is too grateful, too proud of her, to disobey. He in a way, this week, worships her.